


Talked Into It

by Agent_24



Series: ShinDrift Week [4]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-20 08:59:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19373470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Agent_24/pseuds/Agent_24
Summary: Goodbyes have always been Shin's weak point.For ShinDrift Week Day 4: Tempt





	Talked Into It

He'd expected it to happen sooner or later, but in the way that one comes to expect birthdays: always ages away, until suddenly it’s upon you.

They’re hunting Scorn. Drifter’s nervous. He’s kitbashed a little containment unit to suck up a Scorn’s tainted Ether for capture (Shin doesn’t quite understand the mechanics of it, only that it’s similar to the way the banks contain Darkness) and now they just need to test it. They use their own Light to lure out prey, and the container works.

But, like Eliksni, Scorn travel in packs, and some packs are larger than others.

Everything is alright for a time; between Shin’s fast draw with a cannon (Trust, modified and shaded with accents of gold) and Drifter’s Breakneck, the Scorn go down quick. It’s their leader that gives them trouble, shielded and swollen with Dark Ether as it is. It brings Drifter down with a plasma cannon that gleams a sickly purple, and this would, ordinarily, be fine, except that Drifter’s red-eyed Ghost springs up, and Shin briefly thinks of weapon suppliers and sorrowful bullets and Cayde —

Shin lights his fire in panic. He hasn’t built up enough energy for it after using his Light as a lure, and so the shot he fires off is weak, but the Scorn still burns to a crisp, quick and merciless.

And the whispers, quiet for so long now, descend on Shin as if they’d been waiting for the opportunity.

It brings him to his knees. He cannot remember the last time he heard them scream like this [say goodbye]. His ears ring with it [lonesome again]; he casts off his helmet, holds his hands to his ears [another loss, iminent] and stares in horror as his shaking hands come away bloody. The world is spinning [you lose what you dare love], Shin’s chest seizes [you will ache yet another time] and distantly, he registers that Drifter has risen, registers his voice, his hands.

* * *

Shin heads back to his own ship for a few days. He needs time to consider what happened on the Tangled Shore, needs time away from Drifter’s watchful blue (beautiful, lightless) eyes and his prying questions. There has been no more blood in Shin’s ears since then, but a few faint whispers still linger [farewell].

He takes some time. He makes a decision.

He weeps over it.

* * *

Drifter looks at him funny when he transmats onto the Derelict and meets him in his little crate of a living space.

“Where’ve you been?” Drifter asks, like he's suspicious about it.

Shin hesitates. They did not talk about the blood in his ears. Drifter had offered to let him come here to clean up, but...well. Shin transmats his helmet away and exhales, his breath a steamy cloud in the Derelict’s frigid air. “Around,” he says.

“Not from where I was standing,” Drifter scoffs, folding his arms. “You make a man nervous, y’know that? Thought you’d run off somewhere and fallen off the deep end.”

A bittersweet smile flits over Shin’s face, there and gone in an instant. Had Drifter been worried? Shin’s heart feels fit to burst for it, even as it plummets down to his stomach. Isn’t this precisely why he needs to stop, why he ought to cut this off at the root while he can? There can be nothing else after this. Drifter knows everything now, all his names, his face, his voice, his touch. There will be no sneaking back into his life after this, no second (third, fourth) shot at hope.

Shin does his very best to keep his face neutral. He says, “I just needed time.”

Drifter’s frown deepens. His eyes flit over Shin’s form, curious, and he relaxes when he finds nothing terribly amiss, at least marginally. “Alright,” he says.

Shin rushes close suddenly, cups his face and kisses him. Drifter makes a startled noise against his mouth, tenses up before he melts into it, and Shin could sing for the way Drifter arches against him when he puts his hands at the small of the man’s back.

“What —” Drifter gasps, the word smushed between their lips, and draws back just enough to speak between kisses and brief flicks of tongue, “What’s the matter with you?”

 _Everything,_ Shin thinks miserably, but only says, desperate and raw, “Want you bad, Drifter.”

The sharp inhale he gets in response feels like more than he deserves from this man.

He takes Drifter to bed, takes him to pieces on the tiny cot. Underneath layers of sleeping bags, they wrestle each other out of their clothes; Shin maps Drifter’s body with his hands and his mouth, commits the shape of him to memory. He listens to the sounds Drifter makes under his ear, against his jaw, into his hair, and he wishes he wasn’t doomed to forget them.

“Shin,” Drifter rasps, high pitched. “Shin, I can’t —”

Shin shushes him, even though he would do almost anything to keep hearing Drifter say his name. But it has been hours, and this would be the third time he has brought Drifter to orgasm, so he rolls his hips a little slower now and lets himself come. Drifter trembles and shudders underneath him before he relaxes, lets out a quiet whine as Shin presses lazy kisses against his throat.

He lays against Drifter’s body for a moment, nearly dozing off before he shakes himself awake and pulls out. Drifter grimaces, and Shin gets up to grab a towel, the floor of the crate ice cold against his bare feet.

He’s wiping a spot of come from Drifter’s thigh when he realizes the man is staring at him. Feeling caught and guilty, he hands the towel over, turns away to offer some measure of privacy while Drifter wipes up the mess between his legs.

Drifter asks quietly, “You leaving?”

Shin freezes. There is a lengthy and deafening silence. He asks, “What makes you say that?”

The line of Drifter’s jaw tightens. He has not looked up to meet Shin’s eyes. “Last time you fucked me like that,” he mutters, “You left me.”

Is he so transparent? Has he gotten so lazy in this little semblance of domesticity that he forgot how to convincingly pretend everything was fine? Has he been so burningly affectionate in this last bout of intimacy that he gave himself away?

Maybe Drifter just knows him too well by now. Shin thinks back on the Renegade days and frowns, knits his brows and squeezes his eyes shut as he realizes that must be the truest of those options. That’s always a gleeful and bitter thing to think about, that Drifter knows him better than anyone else.

“It’s best if I do,” he says.

Drifter’s face twists. It highlights the age lines at his eyes and the bags underneath them, the fullness of his mouth and the strong bridge of his nose. He balls up the towel and tosses it to the floor, then demands, “This ‘cause your ears started bleeding again?”

Shin winces. “Drifter,” he says, nearly helpless.

“You don’t get to walk out on me without telling me why.”

Shin doesn’t know how to say why. He never planned it out, never intended to be caught in the act. He doesn’t even have a letter this time. How do you tell a man you’re afraid he will be your undoing?

He asks tiredly, “What do you want me to say?”

“Something!” Drifter snaps. “Fuck’s sake, it ain’t that difficult. You leavin’ cause you bled or what?”

“I —”

“Yes or no, you flighty prick.”

Shin just exhales.

“I knew it,” Drifter grumbles, then, angrier, “I fucking knew it! Soon as you didn’t come back to my ship, I knew it.” He sits up further. Shin watches goosebumps spread over his skin in the cold air before Drifter pulls the topmost sleeping bag up to his chest. “What the hell do you think you’re gonna solve by running off to god knows where by yourself, huh? Or you runnin’ back to Bane again?”

That stings. “There’s nothing Bane knows that I don’t,” he says, bitter. “Don’t make assumptions.”

“I wouldn’t have to if you weren’t the most secretive bastard in the system,” Drifter bites out. “Comin’ from me, that means a damn lot.”

“Drifter,” Shin says sharply, and his lost patience means he ignores the immediate tensing of Drifter’s shoulders; why couldn’t he just let this be simple? Why couldn’t he let Shin just say his wordless goodbyes and go? “You’re right, okay? It’s ‘cause I bled. You know my cursed name and you know the goddamn legends. Stop asking me stupid questions about fucking _Teben_ and think for a minute.”

He cannot remember the last time he raised his voice at this man. Maybe he hasn’t ever. Maybe he spent too long trying to make sure Drifter — Eli, Hope, Drifter — didn’t spook, didn’t flinch from him, but why bother now, when he’s leaving and it doesn’t matter?

Drifter swallows like something caught in his throat. “Don’t tell me you bled ‘cause of me,” he says, a layer of nervous laughter underneath his voice.

Shin brings a hand up to rub his temples, shuts his eyes. “By the Traveler, you’re so fucking thick sometimes,” he sighs, then softens, miserable and quiet. “I don’t wanna bury you.”

“Are you shitting me?” Drifter asks.

Shin looks up.

Drifter stares at him a moment, reading his expression, then lets out a sharp bark of incredulous laughter. If there’s humor in it, he doesn’t show it. “You scared I’m gonna keel over? That’s what this is about?”

Shin doesn’t want to be having this conversation naked. He doesn’t want to be having this conversation at all. He grits his teeth. He asks, “Is that a crime?” and nearly flinches when it comes out weak.

“It’s a hell of a lot of irony,” Drifter says. He looks pale, like the concept makes him sick. Maybe it does. That stings, too.

“You being afraid of me doesn’t mean I ever intended to kill you, or wanna see you be killed,” Shin says after a moment.

“You would’ve if I’d stepped too far over the edge.”

“But you didn’t,” Shin points out. Is he supposed to confess here, say that Hope leaving the Shadows was a blessing and a curse? Is he supposed to say he’s glad Drifter got out? How his heart had leapt when he found him again, new and different and even more afraid of the world? Drifter’s gone silent. Shin feels a thousand damning words on the tip of his tongue.

[Say farewell.]

“I can’t lose you,” Shin murmurs, and if feels like pulling the stitches out of festering wounds.

“How the hell is this not losing me?” Drifter asks, loud. Distressed, maybe. Disbelieving. He clenches the sleeping bag tight in his fist; Shin wants to rub the goosebumps from his shoulders.

Instead, he corrects, “I can’t lose you like I lost my parents. Jaren. Others the legends don’t bother mentioning. Don’t tell me you don’t know what that’s like, not wanting to put somebody in the dirt.”

Drifter’s jaw tightens again. His meets Shin’s gaze, a low, simmering kind of anger burning in those eyes. “I’ve survived worse than you, Malphur,” he says.

“You are gonna unmake me, Drifter,” Shin says. It’s part plea, part blunt desperation, part hollow attempt to make him see. He has nothing left to argue but the bare truth of it.

Drifter freezes for a second, then draws his knees up as if Shin has cornered him. Shin lets his Light keep him warm, but he imagines their body heat has escaped the blankets. Drifter says, “I’m not letting you outta my sight.”

Shin blinks, parts his lips. [Say farewell.]

“If you think I’m letting you run off to pick a new name and cause trouble for me all over again,” Drifter goes on, like this is all easy, “You’ve lost your goddamn mind. So either... either you say here where I can keep my eye on you, or I’ll follow you ‘cross the system for the rest of your sorry life.”

Shin could kiss him. His ears itch. He smiles and it doesn’t reach his eyes. “What about Gambit?”

“I’ll send someone after you.”

“Your protege?”

“If I gotta. She’d love to beat your ass.”

He’s sure she would. He wonders how it’d all go down; maybe she’d use Malfeasance. Maybe she’d use The Last Word out of spite. Maybe Drifter would ask a favor of Aunor, and send Tirte off with arc binds for his Ghost. Maybe he’d wake up in the Derelict again.

“Think about it,” Drifter says tightly, urgent, like a request, or maybe another deal.

[Say farewell.]

Shin says, “I’ll think about it.”

His ears itch.

 


End file.
